Artificial Synchronicity – ponypuristv3.0.com

Years ago, I read about the concept of synchronicity from Steve Pavlina’s blog — probably in an article, such as this one: https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2013/08/synchronicity/. Since that time, Steve Pavlina has talked about synchronicity in other similar blog posts, as well as talked about it within other unrelated blog posts. This was before artificial intelligence. Having used AI a lot, I’ve started noticing some interesting suggestions in some of my “recommended” or “related” stuff on the few social media platforms that I use where these things still appear. Perhaps AI has figured out that some people appear to be into the idea of synchronicity and is taking advantage of that — or maybe AI is just creating artificial synchronicities because that’s just what it does.

One example of this happening (in relation to being on YouTube) is when the AI algorithm took a random word that appeared on a piece of paper in one of my videos and started recommended related videos based on that word. A second example is when it took the number of videos I had uploaded and started recommending videos that contained that number in the title. In a third example, the algorithm seemed to have utilized information from my contacts list on my phone (which I keep relatively separate), recommending a YouTuber with the same name. Lastly, LinkedIn took a fragment of a person’s (I sent a message to on LinkedIn) nickname (which I don’t think appeared in their profile on LinkedIn) and recommended them to me as a contact because this other person went to the same university as the person I was contacting on LinkedIn.

These are the same patterns that I saw when I interacted with AI via character.ai, ChatGPT, and in creating images with AI — except now it’s applied to social media recommendations.

Of course, it’s obvious to me that this is the work of AI, as the recommendations make little sense. But to someone who isn’t familiar with AI, they might view it as a synchronicity — hence, the creation of artificial synchronicity with the help of AI.

Much like the commercial industry surrounding Valentine’s Day, there’s a potential business opportunity here — a potential to exploit and to be exploited.